months of her life in 1969. She was weak and frail from overwork and
a lifetime of drug dependency, running out of money, unmoored,
without a home to call her own. Still, her ‘gloriously defiant pathos’
was praised by the Evening Standard; The Stage called her ‘super-
charged with warmth and love and affection and laughter and tears’;
the Financial Times crowned her ‘the Maria Callas of popular music’;
and The Times wrote that ‘for a definition
of theatrical magic one need look no
further’. The concerts broke all records at
the Talk of the Town.
Both Zellweger and Buckley grew up
adoring Garland, finding her talent,
empathy and courage wildly inspiring
throughout their lives. ‘She’s one in a
million years,’ Zellweger wrote to me,
mak ing my day. ‘The production experi-
ence felt like a collaborative love letter to
her... It’s impossible to imagine the cir-
cum stances that could result in this
beloved person, after working at the
highest levels since early childhood,
struggling financially, professionally, per-
sonally. A person can’t help but admire
what she was able to achieve, despite the
many challenges, and her refusal to give up inspires such respect.’
Buckley has also been greatly moved by Garland’s performance
style and life story, but sounds a note of caution. ‘She was ruthless in
exposing the strength of her vulnerability from the inside out, just
giving it to everyone,’ she says. ‘I look at her and I think, “How do I
let myself be as see-through and raw and human and open as she
was, without being harmed?”’
Goold wanted to make a film that would ‘capture the close-up
feeling of performing’ – the way Garland goes against the grain of
herself; how she ‘inhabits the centrality of the lyric and plays the
complete opposite at the same time’. Stars are so interesting, he says,
when ‘their gift is departing – more graceful when they’re fading...’
He also set out to humanise Garland by showing people the woman
and the mother. ‘She still feels very near – her directness, her unman-
ne r e d q u a l i t y,’ he r e fle c t s. ‘ I hop e p e ople w i l l g o b a c k t o he r wor k , t o
the recordings, to the films and see all she can do...’
I hope so too.
‘Judy’ is in cinemas nationwide from 2 October. Susie Boyt’s memoir,
‘My Judy Garland Life’ (£10.99, Virago), will be reissued on 19 September.Through sheer
force of talent,
she suffuses a
film with as
much unsettling
rich texture as a
poem by Keats
PHOTOGRAPH BY RICHARD AVEDON, © THE RICHARD AVEDON FOUNDATION
to Joseph L Mankiewicz, the writer and director of All About Eve:
‘Over her there seemed to hang a permanent dew.’ She could make
something epic and eternal out of plots that must have looked so
trivial on the page. Take In the Good Old Summertime, the story of a
girl working in a musical-instrument shop who has a long-distance
pen-pal. Garland, through sheer force of talent and personality,
suffuses the film with as much unsettling rich texture as a poem by
Keats. In Meet Me in St Louis, a drama that chronicles a year in the
life of a large family who nearly move to New York, she fills
the screen to the brim with Technicolor fledgling adolescent long-
ing, bias-cut almost, set against a distrust of that longing and a desire
for safety and home.
When given more obviously weighty material, Garland showed
astonishing levels of skill. In A Star is Born, a film that takes the
temperature of all Hollywood, from white mink wraps and Klieg
lights to a night court for drunken vagrants, her Oscar-nominated
performance is complex, ebullient, despairing, subtle at times,
histrionic when necessary. This fable about the exacting nature of
showbusiness, in her hands, becomes a
deep plea for humanity.
When I first saw footage of Garland
singing ‘Ol’ Man River’ on her TV show,
which ran for 26 episodes in America
between 1963 and 1964, I couldn’t believe
the fierceness of her empathy. You might
think it presumptuous for a famous white
woman to sing about the miseries of
back-breaking hard work undertaken by
African-Americans in the Deep South, but
when you watch her it doesn’t seem for a
moment far-fetched. This is what the world
sometimes is, Garland sings: sick, rotten
and sharper than swords, and it absolutely
shouldn’t be allowed.
I watched this repeatedly during the
winter I turned 21. I was living alone,
stunned and grieving after my first boyfriend had died in a climbing
accident in Oxford – so many hopes smashed; sharp currents of fear,
shock and despair coursing through my body, night and day. It was
almost as though Garland was apologising to me on behalf of the
human race. This is just about as bad as things can get, she seemed
to sing to me, but nowhere is there more life than the sphere you
currently inhabit. I put some of these feelings into a memoir I wrote,
layering episodes from my life and Garland’s to look at love, grief,
rescue, heroism and fame.
This autumn, Renée Zellweger stars in Judy, a biopic directed by
Rupert Goold and co-starring Jessie Buckley, fresh from Wild Rose
acclaim. At the centre of the film is a series of concerts Garland gave
in London at the Talk of the Town in the West End during the last